Monday, June 13, 2011

Amina that most sincerely, folks

Following the revelation that Amina Arraf, a lesbian blogger in Damascus, was in reality Tom MacMaster, a straight, male American postgraduate student in Edinburgh (who had borrowed Facebook photographs, taken in Paris, of a Jelena Lecic, a Croatian woman living in London), now seems as zeitgeisty a moment as it could ever be to admit that I am not, as I previously claimed, a straight, balding, grumpy British man who occasionally writes about restaurants in Bangkok, but a celibate Belgian woman who runs a small hardware shop in Montevideo, Uruguay. I hope my readers will a) forgive me; and b) take note of the special offer we have this week on rawlplugs.

I'm really much younger and fitter and my ankle is not giving me gip.But considering your Belgian - do you fancy a big thick Belgian cookery book. Though thinking about it, I guess being Belgian, you may not need it. (I'm trying to offload it. It's massive.)

good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste

So what’s all this Cultural Snow business, then?

“The writing itself is no big thing. I mean I like writing. It’s even relaxing for me. But the content is a real zero. Pointless in fact.”“What do you mean?”“I mean, for instance, you do the rounds of fifteen restaurants in one day, you eat one bite of each dish and leave the rest untouched. You think that makes sense?”“But you couldn’t very well eat everything, could you?”“Of course not. I’d drop dead in three days if I did. And everyone would think I was an idiot. I’d get no sympathy whatsoever.”“So what choice have you got?” she said.“I don't know. The way I see it, it’s like shoveling snow. You do it because somebody’s got to, not because it's fun.”“Shoveling snow, huh?” she mused.“Well, you know, cultural snow,” I said.—from Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)